Auryn Quartet opens CMYS season

Chamber Music in Yellow Springs looks forward to welcoming back the accomplished Auryn Quartet from Germany — “Au” rhymes with “wow,” “ryn” rhymes with “queen,” with the stress on the first syllable — on Sunday, Oct. 9, 7:30 p.m., at First Presbyterian Church. This concert opens a season of European ensembles playing in the village.

Together now for three decades with all its original personnel, the quartet cites the Amadeus Quartet and Guarneri Quartet as the group’s most profound influences early on. Traveling the world and performing at the top music festivals and venues, the Auryn has a large discography, including recordings of the complete Beethoven, Haydn and Brahms quartets. Of these recordings, critics have written rave reviews, such as this one from The Gramophone: “At times, the Auryn performances seem so close to what one sees unfolding on the printed score that it is possible to believe you are hearing directly what Beethoven had in mind.”

The four musicians of the Auryn Quartet — Matthias Lingenfelder and Jens Oppermann on violin, Stewart Eaton on viola, and Andreas Arndt on cello — play on wonderful Italian instruments: a Stradivarius violin (1722, ex-Joachim), a Petrus Guarneri violin, a Brothers Amati viola (1616) and a Niccolo Amati cello.

In Yellow Springs, the Auryn will perform Haydn’s String Quartet in G major, Opus 77/1. Among Haydn’s last works, published in 1801, Opus 77 features a “conversational” style, with call-and-response interactions between the instruments.

Also featured on the program are Bela Bartok’s beautiful String Quartet No. 2, a three-movement piece sometimes thought of as depicting life episodes, and “Three Pieces for String Quartet,” by Stravinsky, both written during World War I. Mozart’s K 465, known as the “Dissonance” Quartet, takes the Auryn back to the 19th century for the conclusion of the concert. The K 465 is one of the “Haydn Quartets,” which Mozart dedicated to Joseph Haydn.

A pre-concert lecture to help familiarize audiences with the music begins at 6:45 p.m. A season ticket to the five CMYS concerts this year is $100 for adults, $25 for full-time students, while individual concert tickets are $25 and $7, available online or at the door. There will be no post-concert dinner for the Auryn. Tickets and more information about this concert and the rest of the season can be found at cmys.org. See also the group’s website at http://www.aurynquartet.com .